Debbie Harris

Countdown to Strawberry

Started:  May 23, ended June 6, 2005

As of this moment there are 2 days, 19 hours, and 47 minutes until the Strawberry Music Festival begins--this is the 4-day folk music festival near Yosemite that I've gone to every year for the past 11 years.  Imagine going camping with 5000 folks for 5 days in the middle of the mountains where there are impromptu jam sessions all day and all night long, scheduled performances and workshops with a huge mix of music styles, and 100 foot pine trees every time you look up. 

I can't even begin to do describe this festival properly, and it is certainly a different festival for each person who goes there.  For me I feel like I'm getting grounded somehow--getting back to the basics of life:  eating, playing the mandolin, playing with my kids, dancing in the sunshine, and learning new songs.  I started going to this festival thanks to my cousins from Palo Alto who along with 60-70 of their friends go up and camp together on the same campsite. 

Whoa--I started this entry before going to Strawberry, and now I'm on a whole new adventure (a conference in Greece, of all places).  When I got back from Strawberry, sure enough the callouses on my left hand were so thick that I couldn't quite feel the keys as I typed on my computer.  This year at Strawberry I saw fewer professional performers than ever before, but I played mandolin much more than ever before.  Isaac and Sonia had a blast playing with old and new friends.

PARTICLE DAY

May 16, 2005

Today I got the chance to tell about a hundred high school students and their teachers about life on the MINOS experiment, and they got the chance to tell me (and eachother) about the research they've been doing this year in their physics classes.  This was all part of PARTICLE DAY, at the University of Rochester.  The way the PARTICLE program works is that high school physics teachers work with folks from the physics department at Rochester to come up with classroom based research programs, which the students then carry out and report on at PARTICLE DAY.  From seeing the students present their work it is clear to me that the best way to get kids into science is to make them see up close what it's like to design and run an entire experiment.  That is certainly what got me into science, although for me I had to go to a national lab, which for most is much farther away than their physics classroom.  The sad part is that I probably wouldn't even know about the program if it weren't for the fact that the director of the program, Kevin McFarland is a good friend of mine (and is pictured multi-tasking at left).   

My job was to give the key-note talk at this one-day conference about my own research experience with starting up a brand new neutrino beam, and it was fun to take a step back and think about how these past few years constitute a "typical research experience".  The students were quiet at first during my talk, but thankfully towards the middle they started asking questions:  did you break anything when you first sent those 10 pulses down the beamline trying to hit the bullseye a mile away to within an inch?  (answer:  no, but that doesn't mean nothing was broken)  Do all these different kinds of neutrinos interact the same amount when they hit the detector? (answer:  no, because the neutrinos interact so differently, the way we see one flavor turn into another is because if it's the second flavor the neutrino can't interact so it just looks like the first flavor disappeared)

But what I enjoyed even more was watching the students report on their work.  When I first found out that I was going to be speaking to 100 high school students and their teachers I felt a little nervous--I didn't realize it would be that big a crowd.  But if you had told me when I was in high school to give a presentation to 100 students about physics I probably would have found a reason to be very ill that day.  But these students gave good talks and you could just tell they were proud of their work and had fun making these measurements.  They also made posters of their work:  I saw more technical detail and knowlege of particle physics in these posters than I dared put into my talk in the first place! 

After the students' talks I had lunch with students from Nazareth Academy who discovered unexpected treasure in their school auditorium ceiling by comparing the rates of cosmic rays in the auditorium to rates in other parts of their school.   They had lots of questions for me at the lunch table, including "I know this is particle day and all, but I saw this great program about string theory and I was wondering what you thought of string theory".  I felt a little guilty saying that I would like string theory a lot more if it could make a prediction--then we could at least prove or disprove it! 

After lunch the students (and I) got a tour of the optics labs at University of Rochester--these tours reminded me of the kinds of tours I used to get when interviewing for jobs, except for the fact that by then I had already "taken the plunge" into doing particle physics and I was probably more concerned with how the interview was going than what I was being shown.  These students seemed much more open to learning about this new area that had nothing to do with the cosmic ray tests they had done in class.  Of course it didn't hurt that the grad students doing the presenting were having fun with the show too...

To top off the visit I took the 6AM flight the next morning from Rochester to Chicago so I could have breakfast with my kids and feel drowsy the rest of the day.  But this was a small price to pay to see these students in action! 

The whole visit went so smoothly and the students presented their work so well that I was basically oblivious to all the work that Kevin and Connie Jones at Rochester go through to put this together every year.  I just hope that one of these days the rest of the field will take notice and more class-room based research programs will spring up around the country!

Surprise Retirement Party

May 12, 2005

Today I went to a surprise retirement party for Sonia's teacher at the Fermilab Children's center, Sue Hardy (link to Fermilab Today story).  It seemed pretty miraculous-- everyone in the school aged 2 and above was waiting in the gym with baited breath, not a single child had leaked the surprise to Sue about the party.  Sue didn't want anyone to make a fuss over her leaving, but after she gave 20 years of her life to taking care of our kids, how can we not let her go without a fuss?  One grateful mom collected old and recent photos of kids Sue has taught over the years and made a huge scrapbook, and the kids and teachers made a quilt with everyone's handprints on it. 

I can't possibly do justice to what a loving and enthusiastic teacher Sue has been for both Isaac and Sonia, but I can certainly give a piece of evidence to her lasting effect on people: there were dozens of parents who stopped by the party to wish Sue well whose kids were long gone from day care.  There were even two women there who were from Sue's first classes at the lab, and it was really fun to see Sue's face light up in recognition of the little girls these women used to be.  I couldn't help but wonder if I was going to be at the lab in 20 years, and if one day I would be going to someone's retirement party with a chic older version of Sonia, (and I also wondered what Sonia would have pierced by then...).

I have heard friends who stay home with their kids say that they could never leave their kids at a day care because day care professionals have one of the highest turnover rates, and how damaging this lack of continuity is to a child's sense of security.  As true as I fear that may be in many places, I am so grateful that it's not the case at the lab--Sonia's "new" teacher Mary took care of Sonia as a 3-year-old, and Mary herself has already been there more than 10 years!  Nevertheless the Children's Center will be a different place without Sue there, and I'm sure it will take all of us time to adjust.    

One week, three victories

May 2-6, 2005

This week saw three events which could all count as victories:  two of them  will undoubtedly make my life more busy than it has been recently, and the last one, though relatively minor, makes my everyday life quite a bit easier. 

Over this past week the target that makes the neutrinos was finally re-installed in its home in the NuMI beamline, surrounded by lots of steel and concrete shielding (the opening in the photo at the left shows the slot into which the target gets lowered, before we started making neutrinos).  The experts have been working on this since March 23 when a leak was discovered in the cooling lines that hold water (see crisis management entry).  Since then, the water has been drained, the target viewed by remote cameras (where we see it looks fine although maybe a bit wet) and reinstalled.  By sending the proton beam on either side and then through the middle of the target ("scanning across") you can now see that there is nothing but air (well, gas, anyway) that is surrounding the target:  when the experts started, there was water around the target because of the leak! 

Anyway, we have started running again, and the leak is being "plugged" by sending Helium gas in to "back-pressure" the leak. People (myself included) don't want to get too optimistic, but it sure is good to be making neutrinos again, and its good to see people hanging out in the MINOS control room "watching the data come in".  My life will get busier because I'll get to be on shift this Monday for starters, and the push will be on to finish all the work I put off "until we got beam back". 

The other coup this week happened on Wednesday:  the "spokespeople" (scientific big kahunas) of MINERvA and I have been meeting with Jim Strait, the head of the Particle Physics Division at Fermilab to go over what the MINERvA experiment needs to get all the R&D done.  We have a design for this great new neutrino detector, but you want to make and test roughly one of each of the pieces before making hundreds of these pieces and installing them 300 feet underground in a beam of neutrinos.

Of course the Lab doesn't have enough money to give MINERvA all the money we need all at once, so we have to prioritize what is most important to get done this fiscal year (meaning before October 1, 2005), and leave what can wait until next year.  Two weeks ago I (as the "project manager") gave Jim a number for how much we needed for our highest priority work, and just this past Wednesday Jim came back to tell us that he can give us what we asked for, which basically means that our budget for this year now is about 4 times higher than it was at the beginning of the week! 

Finally, the last big milestone of the week is that Sonia has started buckling and unbuckling her own seatbelt in her car seat.  I wish I didn't sound so old saying this, but not having to lean across her every time she has to get in and out of the car is a major bonus.  This also means she is free to help me put gas in the car, as you can see in the photo at the left. 

You are what you design...

Cinco de Mayo, 2005

I'm sitting in a NOvA meeting which has miraculously been scheduled for Thursday-Friday instead of Saturday-Sunday, and someone just made a funny joke which I just can't help but try to convey...

The NOvA experiment just got what's called Stage I Approval so people have been injected with a dose of enthusiasm to continue on with the design of the detector. The NOvA detector will be a huge array of liquid scintillator containers, each with its own optical fiber.  64 of these fibers have to get connected to a single device that turns light into electrical signals (phototubes). 

So anyway, in today's meeting there are two back to back talks about the part of the detector that guides the optical fibers from the containers that hold the scintillator to the phototubes.  One talk was given by Tom, who was wearing a jacket and tie (at the time: the picture at the left was taken the next day), and his idea for this "fiber guide" looked very snazzy and streamlined.  The second talk was given by Hans, who was wearing a plaid shirt and wrinkled pants, and his idea looked much more like something that was made in a garage with scavenged parts.  (But it should be said might work equally well).

Both speakers acknowleged the differences between their designs, but as Hans stood up he said "the only difference between Tom and me is that..." (technical details omitted).  Someone from the 40-person audience yelled out "yeah, and you're not dressed as well either". 

This gives me a chance to point out another thing I've noticed about physicists and volleyball (which can obviously be extended to most other fields and sports).  The way you are as a person undoubtedly affects the way you do physics, if you take yourself and your job seriously.  I play volleyball (often with friends from Fermilab) and the people I've both worked with and played volleyball with without fail play volleyball the way they do physics:  some are agressive, others might have a lot of natural ability but don't apply themselves to play (or work) as hard, some are really really good but are very modest so you have to figure it out yourself.  As I type this I wonder what how the people I play with would characterize the way I play...(yet I'm not sure I want to hear). 

p.s. thanks, Reidar for the photo for this entry!